"The Fox Woman" $2,200.00

Bertha Lum, 1916. Signed.

A Brief History of Bertha Lum

Bertha Lum was born Bertha Bull in Iowa in 1869 to amateur artists. An important contributor to the Japonisme movement, her art brings together the curves of art nouveau and the flat planes of color found in ukiyo-e, a Japanese woodblock printing. She may have had her first encounter with Japanese art at the 1893 World’s Fair, held in Chicago. After her marriage to Burt Lum in 1903, the two of them honeymooned in Japan.

In Yokohama, she found a small printmaking shop, where she learned about the art’s techniques and tools. In 1907, she returned to Japan with her two small children and studied woodblock carving and printmaking under Bonkotsu Igami. As the only Western artist featured at the 1912 Tenth Annual Art Exhibit in Ueno Park, her modern pieces were very popular, and her career spread to Chicago and New York. She returned a few more times to Japan and finally settled in Peking in 1922.